GalleyCat has an interesting post on the disappearance of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize winning The Line of Beauty from the bestseller lists. It’s funny to me because here at my store, it is still selling very strongly. Granted, we have it as one of our select books for the holidays and is 20% off, but our market seems different from the one I read about in the papers. Cambridge is weird—most people are liberal and well-educated. Ann Coulter just doesn’t sell well here. But Alan Hollinghurst does. As does Cloud Atlas and other books that people say don’t sell anymore. My point is that I tend to look at the book world in a skewed fashion. We don’t sell some stuff here because there it’s just not the right market. We don’t sell that many mass markets—no Danielle Steele or Nora Roberts. We don’t carry the Left Behind stuff. We do sell almost 20 copies a month of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the U.S.: 1492-Present. Our bestseller list looks nothing like the NYT bestseller list. Anyway, I think it is great that my store puts emphasis on quality and the community. It makes for a great store and a great place to work.

And as for Vernon God Little’s poor sales, maybe that’s because the book is crap.